Questions and Answers

Brockwood Park, 2nd meeting 1980

Question: I have been a member of a Gurdjieff group. I find it has given me a background to better understanding of what you are saying. Should I continue with such a group in order possibly to help others, as I was helped? Or does a group make for fragmentation?

This is an extraordinary idea, this idea of helping others, as though you have comprehension, beauty, love and truth, the whole world of order, and that great immense sense of wholeness. If you have that you do not talk about helping others.

Why do we want to belong to something? - belong to some sect, some group, some religious body? Is it because it gives us strength? Is it that we cannot stand alone? The word `alone' means all one. Is it that we need encouragement, need somebody to tell us this is the right way? The questioner says: As I belong to a certain group, it has helped me to understand you. Understand what? Me? Do please look at it. Understand what we are talking about? Do we need interpreters to understand what we are talking about? - to be kind, to love, to have no sense of nationality? Does it need anybody to tell us that? Why do we depend on others, whether the other be an image in a church, in a temple or mosque, or the preacher, the psychologists? Why do we depend on others? If we do depend on others psychologically we become secondhand people, which we are. The whole history of mankind is in us - the story of mankind is not in books except for outward things; the whole history is here. And we do not know how to read it. You understand what I am saying? You are the book. But when you read the book as a reader it has no meaning. But if you are the book and the book is showing you, telling you the story, then you will not depend on a single person, you will be a light unto yourself. But we are all waiting for a match, the fire of another, to kindle the light. Perhaps that is why you are all here. And that is where the tragedy lies, because we cannot see clearly for ourselves. Before we help others we have to see clearly, for God's sake! It is like the blind leading the blind.